Google Panda Recovery Guide 2015 to get back on SERP’s

June 17, 2015

Google’s search algorithm Panda has been shaking the SEO world since its release (February 2011), many small and brands get a penalty whenever the new version of this algorithm is released. Hence, this algorithm is a big nightmare for those websites which have low quality spam content.

On 23rd September 2014, Google rolled out Panda 4.1, which was Google’s 27th Panda Update. This update also penalized several big brands’ like office365.com, hallmark.com, eHow.com etc. Also, Google said that it will not likely to announce the update of the Panda algorithm as it would be included in the indexing process permanently.

These incidents clearly show that it is necessary for websites to do something that will keep them safe. If your website got hit by Google Panda or you want to keep your website away from the penalty then you should follow the following recommendations:

Write quality content:

You have been hearing this for a long time that Google likes superior quality content and it is very necessary for you to like it too. Google is very serious about the quality of content and so you should be.

But what is the parameter for Google to consider content as high-quality? Well, there is no certain parameter, but experts say that content that is original, informativeand produced bydeep research &thoughtful analysis considered as high quality content.Therefore, Google expects websites to deliver content that adds value, so the user can take benefit out of it.

There are some things which you should keep in your mind while writing content, for example the word count, number of targeted keywords etc. An article should keep minimum 800-1000 words as longer articles ranks well in search results. Also, you should include targeted keywords in your article, but you must not stuff the keywords.

Remove Low quality content:

This is an important step that you need to take to recover from panda penalty. Google doesn’t like the content that is generated by machines or that is poorly written with several grammatical errors. Thus, you need to analyze your whole website to find out the low quality content.

Once you find all this content, you have to either remove it or modify it. Depending on the situation you can choose an appropriate action that is suitable for you.Sometimes it is convenient to just modify the content to improve the quality of it, but sometimes it becomes necessary to remove the content.

But how would you decide whether it is a low quality content, to confirm that you can ask some questions from yourself:

Is it valuable for readers?

Is it well researched and analyzed?

Can a user trust on the information provided in the article?

These questions will certainly help you decide whether the quality of content is high or low.

Remove Thin Content

There was a time when 100 words with a couple of images in a blog post used to bring necessary SEO benefits to a website but that situation has been changed long ago. Now it is considered as thin content and Google does not like it at all because it either adds a little value or no value.

Generally pages which have content generated by automatic content generators, scrapped from other sites or low quality guest blog posts have thin content. This violates the webmaster guidelines of Google and thus, you need to immediately remove the thin content or rewrite to make it longer.

Remove Duplicate content:

Duplicate content is the content that is either partially or completely matches with some other content. Google has a strict policy for those websites which post any sort of duplicate content.

In many cases, website owner deliberately post duplicate content to manipulate search rankings and traffic that is a deceptive and a black hat technique.

But there are some cases when one page has two URLs and that is considered as duplicate. Such as:

http://www.example.com/

http://www.example.com/index.html

Both pages are same in the Google’ eye, so appropriate action needed to be taken. In this case it is implementing the canonical tag or 301 redirection. You can find out more about these cases in this post.

Remove Site wide Internal Links

When you build a website, the navigation structure generally creates site wide links to your domain’s popular web pages. Commonly, you can find these links in the footer or sidebar, these links are placed on identical anchor texts. These links are also counted as duplicate and decrease the authority of your website.

Thus, you need to remove entire site wide links to remove the duplicity issue from your website.

Conclusion

Recovering from Panda penalty is not easy, especially when you do not know what to do. But this article summarizes all the necessary points that a website should consider. So do not wait anymore, follow all these recommendations and get your website out of the Panda penalty zone.